The Ministry of Defence (MOD) has released a truly mealy-mouthed statement to justify the massive role far-right AI firm Palantir has within the British war machine. Palantir has won contracts for all manner of services and infrastructure. This is despite sustained criticism and public concern.

The statement was signed by a Who’s Who of UK defence officials:

THE RT HON JOHN HEALEY MP Secretary of State for Defence

Chief of the Defence Staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton KCB ADC FREng

National Armaments Director, Rupert Pearce

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Permanent Secretary, Jeremy Pocklington CB

Chief of Defence Nuclear, Maddy McTernan CB

And opened with the claim:

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is reshaping the modern battlefield and will profoundly transform the future of warfare. In the past few years, AI models have progressed from completing basic tasks to surpassing PhD-level intelligence.

By way of explanation, they claimed:

Defence faces a clear imperative – we must adopt and exploit AI faster than our adversaries. If we fail to do this the UK will lose its operational advantage and cede advantage to our adversaries. The stakes could not be higher.

The UK military is currently locked into a multi-billion pound contract with Palantir. The statement makes no mention of Palantir, despite the genocide-linked firm’s role being the source of most controversy.

The UK military, police, NHS and, allegedly, the Telegraph have started using Palantir technology. The firm maintains a permanent desk in southern Israel, and is deeply involved in Israel’s genocide in Gaza, as well as Trump’s paramilitary immigration operations, ICE, whose officers use the firm’s gear.

On 2 June, the Canary reported that UK officials have even been using Palantir software to decide what Palantir technology to buy to fight future wars. On 4 June, we also heard how former spy chief David Omand had been promoting the idea that integrating AI into warfare is somehow be ethical.

During the same week, we reported that Palantir had won a contract to manage UK firearms, explosives, and related stockpiles.

Time to divest from Palantir

Then on 4 June, the UK technology select committee went against the tide to warn that Palantir’s takeover of key parts of the UK state was an “unacceptable weakness.” The committee also rejected the notion that the firm was the only available choice:

Palantir should not have such a significant role in the UK public sector, and that it is far from the only company capable of providing the data analysis ‘middleware’ required by public bodies.

The firm’s founders are open about their far-right politics. A 22-tweet ‘manifesto’ posted on X in April showed Palantir’s vision was exposed as a collection of right-wing tropes.

For example, point 21 reads:

Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive. All cultures are now equal. Criticism and value judgments are forbidden. Yet this new dogma glosses over the fact that certain cultures and indeed subcultures … have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful.

While Point 22 is a fascist-accented lament for Western white supremacy:

We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism. We, in America and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity. But inclusion into what?

Palantir isn’t the only AI firm with military contracts. That is true. But it is one of the most prominent and dangerous. The company’s links to Israel, the CIA and Donald Trump mark it out as such. Palantir’s vision is also acutely authoritarian and fascistic and its leadership are open about this.

No milquetoast press release is going to change that reality.

Featured image via Omar Marques / Getty Images

By Joe Glenton

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A judge is expected to sentence four Palestine Action activists as ‘terrorists’ on 12 June, despite the activists not being convicted as such.

Judge Jeremy Johnson has indicated he may add a ‘terrorist connection’ to the charges of Charlotte Head, Samuel Corner, Leona (Ellie) Kamio and Fatema Rajwani under section 69 of the Sentencing Act 2020. This is despite the jury convicting the Palestine Action four of criminal damage in their retrial.

The conviction follows the four activists’ direct action to damage computers and drones, and spray red paint across the walls and floor of an Elbit Systems factory in Filton, near Bristol on 6 August 2024. Elbit Systems is Israel’s largest arms firm.

On 5 May, the jury convicted them without the knowledge that presiding judge Johnson could later impose a terror link during sentencing. This is due to a long list of reporting restrictions on the UK press, which the judge used to block coverage that he’d barred defendants from speaking about their motivations for joining Palestine Action.

Judge gags Palestine Action

The gagging orders that judge Johnson issued also prevented the defendants from providing information to the jury on the Israeli genocide in Gaza, and Elbit Systems’ role in it.

Johnson also banned media from reporting that the defendants could face terrorism sentences. The restrictions only lifted on 12 May, a week after the conviction.

Should the judge sentence the ‘Filton Four’, as they’re now known, as terrorists, they could serve far longer prison sentences. They could also face severe limitations on their lives upon release.

On 5 June, Defend Our Juries (DOJ) filed a complaint against Johnson with the Judicial Conduct Investigations Office. Over 3,000 people, including lawyers, law professors, retired police officers and magistrates, have signed the complaint. It alleges that decisions taken by the judge “amount to a pattern of exceptional, biased and discriminatory conduct”. Judge Johnson has since refused to recuse himself from the case.

The DOJ complaint also cites Johnson’s decision to treat the defendants’ desire to prevent Israel’s mass killings of Palestinian civilians as an aggravating, rather than mitigating, feature.

According to the judge, the intention to prevent the deaths of Palestinian civilians is what brings their actions within the scope of the Terrorism Act. He regards it as an attempt to “influence the Israeli government”.

Additionally, the DOJ complaint accuses Johnson of acting “vindictively” in remanding Head, Kamio and Rajwani to custody after their retrial. Three of the four have served eighteen months on remand, with Corner having been inside for 21 months.

Commenting, Campaign Against Arms Trade spokesperson Kirsten Bayes said:

For generations, at Greenham Common, Aldermaston, Fairford and others, the peace movement has taken action against military logistics and supply chains, involving breaching security and causing damage.

Keir Starmer himself was part of the legal team defending the ‘Fairford Five’, who carried out direct action at RAF Fairford during the Iraq war.

The ‘Filton Four’ case bears close parallels to the ‘Raytheon Nine’, where the defendants were acquitted of criminal damage at the Raytheon factory in Derry in 2006. In this case, the activists attempted to stop weaponry being sold to Israel for use against Lebanon. Their motivations for allegedly damaging office equipment were treated as a mitigating rather than an aggravating factor, as they should be.

In the Filton raids, it was abundantly clear that neither the Israeli nor UK government were the target, as they were and remain far beyond reasonable influence. Instead, Palestine Action activists sought to disrupt the means of production.

Just as one would deny a carving knife to a murderer, these four activists sought to prevent their nation from supplying murder weapons to the genocidal Israeli government. In doing so, the Filton Four upheld an ethical duty to prevent harm, and only did so when it was clear that all ordinary options had been exhausted.

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Sentencing the Filton Four as ‘terrorists’ when they were not convicted as such, and when the evidence that might have supported that conclusion was not even allowed to be heard in court, would not only be unprecedented but grotesque and dystopian.

It will always be the case that those taking non-violent direct action to prevent complicity in genocide are acting in service of humanity.

It must be said that it is a dire reflection of the UK’s police and judiciary that the Filton Four will likely be sentenced as ‘terrorists’, weeks after the Met police refused to even investigate a single one of the 2,000+ UK nationals now known to have served in Israel’s genocidal army.

Featured image via Leon Neal / Getty Images

By The Canary

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Legal experts and social justice campaigners have hit back against Kemi Badenoch’s plan to scrap the public sector equality duty, PSED, aka ‘the duty’.

Besides the obvious dire impact that the move would have on minoritised individuals across the UK, Badenoch’s argument displayed fundamental misunderstandings of the duty itself — which requires public bodies to assess the impact of their services on people with legally protected characteristics.

Dancing to Reform’s tune

In a 9 June speech, the Tory leader announced her intention to “repeal the public sector equality duty in its entirety.” Badenoch claimed the PSED had led to a pursuit of “equality of outcome” rather than “equal treatment and equality under the law”. She added that:

There are many laws which were brought in with good intentions but are delivering perverse outcomes and unintended consequences.

The PSED requires public sector leaders to abide by equality considerations set out in the 2010 Equality Act. Principally, this means working to prevent discrimination against people with protected characteristics — race, sex, disability etc — and monitoring the outcomes of that work.

Badenoch’s speech came just a week after Nigel Farage exploited the murder of Henry Nowak to attack diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives — better known as ‘EDI’ in the UK. Reform UK had also announced, several months earlier, that it plans to rip up the Equality Act completely.

Equality duty is ‘there to help’

In response to Badenoch’s announcement, a spokesperson for the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) — the body responsible for overseeing the application of the Equality Act — explained that the PSED doesn’t function as the Tory leader was trying to make out. Rather, they stated:

The PSED is not a barrier to these organisations doing the job the public expects them to do.

Most take it seriously and use the requirements of the PSED to design the best possible services for everyone. It’s there to help them make good decisions, based on an understanding of the impact those decisions have on everyone that they affect.

Professor of human rights law Colm O’Cinneide, of University College London, took a similar tack:

What the duty does is to impose a positive obligation upon public bodies to engage with these issues and to do more than just to maintain basic legal compliance, but to actually take proactive steps to eliminate problems that may exist, even if they’re not triggering a specific litigation risk.

He also underlined the shoddy nature of overall argument against the PSED:

A lot of the criticism is effectively cherrypicking individual issues and saying that because these controversies are in some way tangentially related to the duty, the entire mechanism is flawed.

Wrong… or opportunistic?

However, as the Muslim Engagement and Development (MEND) highlighted, Badenoch knows perfectly well how the PSED actually functions. MEND commented on the leader of the opposition’s glaring hypocrisy:

Kemi Badenoch says the Equality Act should be “a shield to protect you from discrimination, not a sword for social engineering.” But the duty she wants to scrap is precisely what makes that shield work. It requires public bodies to consider who their decisions might harm before they act. Remove the duty and you take the shield away.

This is also a remarkable reversal from Badenoch, who in December 2023 when Minister for Women and Equalities, wrote to every public authority instructing them to comply with this very duty, and stated that there is no hierarchy of rights because every person holds a protected characteristic. Either she was wrong then, or she is being opportunistic now.

You can read that letter here, complete with the call for public sector leaders to “ensure that equality issues are actively considered”. No prizes for guessing the Canary’s pick out of “wrong then” and “opportunistic now”.

‘Free hand to harm your life chances’

Meanwhile, other commentators focused on the dire impacts that scrapping the PSED would have on all minoritised communities. Paul Nowak, general secretary of the Trade Union Congress, didn’t hold back:

This proposal would give a future Tory government a free hand to harm your life chances if you’re a woman, gay, black, disabled or working class.

Likewise, the Traveller Movement — a charity supporting Irish Travellers, Romani and Roma people — stated that: 

Removing the Public Sector Equality Duty risks creating a cycle in which inequalities are identified only after harm has occurred, rather than being addressed at the earliest stage. Over time, this could result in the experiences and needs of marginalised communities carrying less weight in public decision-making, making it harder to challenge disadvantage and rebuild trust in public institutions.

For Romani (Gypsy), Roma and Irish Traveller communities, which continue to face significant barriers in areas such as education, health, housing and access to public services, the potential consequences of weakening these safeguards are particularly concerning. Any proposal to remove the Public Sector Equality Duty would lead to the most marginalised communities being put most at risk.

‘Common sense’ is a call for more racism

Lastly, independent MP and career-long human rights advocate Diane Abbott commented that: 

Ending current equality rules is dangerous and divisive; a green light for all the bigots and racists. This happens when your ambition is no greater than to be the Nick Clegg in a Farage-led government

In particular, the mother of the house highlighted the Tory leader’s ridiculous appeal to ‘common sense’ to prevent discrimination. Regarding the issue of public accommodations for disabled people, Badenoch claimed that:

You don’t need a duty to tell you to take account of differences. Quite often differences are obvious.

Abbott, in return, stated that:

We live in a society where racism is commonplace. Macpherson’s call to tackle it were only ever partially taken up. ‘Common sense’ is a call for more racism not less.

The reference to Macpherson in there refers to Badenoch’s attacks on the Macpherson report. After the shamefully police handling of the racially-motivated murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993, the landmark report branded UK policing as institutionally racist.

It’s natural that Badenoch would try to critique the Macpherson report. Likewise, it’s natural that she’d fail so spectacularly. The report and its findings are the quintessential example of just how wrong the Tory leader and her ilk are.

If avoiding discrimination is simply a matter of common sense, then the police ignored it in favour of vicious  racism. Conversely, if avoiding discrimination isn’t common sense, then the duty to consider it is a helpful, legally enforceable reminder.

Unfortunately for Badenoch, she’s wrong either way you slice it.

Featured image via YouTube / the Canary

By Alex/Rose Cocker

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